It’s better than a mass e-mail

According to The Economist’s survey this week on the new media, blogs are a conversation. They are interactive. Teenagers (… and some of my adult friends now that I think of it) are using them to chat with each other and make plans, rather than using email or IM, and newspapers should be using them to allow their readers to interact with reporters, editors and each other (more on that later).

So with that in mind – and assuming I have at least a couple readers (as evidenced by comments from Daddy Yankee and Bo Bice, which I particularly enjoy) – I’d like to solicit input. I considered sending an email out to my friends, but considering this blog is called “it’s better than a mass email,” this might be the best forum.

I am looking for music suggestions. Since discovering the ease and excitement of music downloads, I need some new music. Plus, I like to send out year-end best-of CDs and so far, all I’ve got so far is Reggaeton and Bachata and I am not sure I want to do an all Latin music best of. So what are you listening to? (I realize this blog has never been a spot for tons of comments and interaction, but I thought I’d give this a try….)

The survey also got me thinking about the state of affairs in the newspaper business, and despite some of the discouraging outlooks both in The Economist stories as well as pretty much every where you read about newspapers, I don’t think it’s dire. One person predicted that the last newspaper would be read and recycled in 2040 (which I don’t fully buy), but that doesn’t mean the industry will be dead. Maybe newspapers as we know them – printed each night on newsprint so it arrives when we wake up – but assuming they get their act together, chances are they will be around for a while to come.

The average profit margin for the largest papers is around 20 percent, compared with some 7 or 8 percent for most Fortune 500 companies. So they are making money, and just need to rebuild the industry. Enter the opportunity for interaction with readers through the Web sites – and perhaps eventually putting content only online – and taking advantage of online ad dollars, which I understand many papers aren’t doing.

It seems to be a stubborn industry, hesitant to embrace or even research the changing media world around them. Many reporters fear bloggers will take away their jobs (while bringing down the standard of journalism with lack of credentials or editing), but rather than working with the changes, they are largely rejecting it and will soon find themselves getting left behind. What papers seem to have going for them is a trusted name and a reputation, and if they bring this into the current climate, I think they can continue to present news and analysis in the new media world.

Maybe I am trying to be optimistic as I continue to look for a job in this damn media industry, and I don’t want to think the money I spent on grad school was wasted….

Confession time: I watched American Idol last night and liked it.

I haven’t watched the show since they crowned Kelly Clarkson, who by the way did go on to produce a handful of undeniably good hits. Act like you don’t turn “Since U Been Gone” up and sing along when you hear it. I have had to pretend that her progressive thinness and blondness has not directly correlated to her increased fame. I just can’t help but like her and all that love-who-you-are independent woman stuff she touted. In fact, I think I need to download a few of her songs right now….

The next season didn’t do much for me, although I guess I should have been supporting Reuben who hails from the 205. My hometown had Reuben Fever – my family included – but I guess there is always some element of surprise and obligatory support when someone from Alabama hits fame outside of football. (Rumor has it another Bama boy got pretty far on Idol? Oh, and I just discovered that a dude from this season was born in the ‘Ham. Dang, who knew?)

Anyway, I got bored with American Idol and the hype it produced. Mainly I was disgusted by how they paraded obviously bad singers in front of the cameras to draw in viewers (i.e. William Hung – and didn’t he get astronomically albeit temporarily famous for his horrible rendition of some Ricky Martin song?) Plus, I didn’t care about the dynamic between Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell. I feel like just admitting that Simon is a nasty, hateful human being just fuels the argument that his schtick sells. It does. He’s usually right and his delivery makes people love to hate him.

And even though I try to avoid Fox and everything it stands for – have you noticed all their shows come with a “viewer discretion advised”? – I was hooked on Idol last night. I found myself talking back at the judges – at one point Paula cried and Simon got cut off by the theme music – and deciding which singer I would vote for. With the talent, or lack thereof (um, that blond Southern girl who struggled through her love song last night? Ouch.), the drama of the judges, the catchy theme music – I can see why so many millions of people watch it each week. I must say I hope my interest in the show is fleeting, but I had to admit it was entertaining.

I got shot in my dream last night. This isn’t the first time I’ve dreamed of being shot – in fact, as a cops reporter, I had pretty disturbing dreams – but it always kind of shakes me up.

I watched a fairly violent movie last night with lots of murder and mayhem, so I guess I went to sleep with gun violence on the brain. In my dream I was being chased through an abandoned house with my (not real life) grandmother and grandfather in tow. Finally one guy catches up to us and he kindly gives me a chance to make a case for why he shouldn’t kill us. I started on some teary rant that clearly didn’t convince him, and he shot me twice in the hand. The hand. Why the hand? I remember feeling a sharp burning in my hand as I slept, and I look down at the bloody mess and wondered how it was that my fingers were all still intact.

Then I recall screaming out, “No! I’m a writer! I’m a writer!” As in, how dare he shoot me there? Like the shooter has just ruined my life by choosing my hand as the target. It felt so dire in the dream and now it just feels ridiculous.

Lest you all think I am just wasting my days watching movies and experimenting with blog layout, I’ll have you know I have been a busy woman. I’ve even been dabbling in a new hobby: cooking. Yesterday I made whole wheat tortillas from scratch, which were surprisingly good, and today’s exploit is low-calorie oatmeal cookies, which taste unsurprisingly not good. I substituted the butter for applesauce and the recipe called for a suspiciously small amount of sugar – and the taste corresponds: kind of bland, gummy and appley.

But the important part of this is that I baked. That’s right, I used the oven. It didn’t explode, no hair was singed, and I didn’t have a come-apart. I think I am officially over my oven phobia. That and healthy cookies.

[Editor's note, Part 2: I'm back to the original layout. Sure, I'm indecisive, but I also don't think I liked the white space and large font of the last template. That's for those of you who are following my layout changes....]

Now back to more important things. Like shower regimen. Last fall I began something of an experiment that required me to temporarily abandon my trusty bar soap in the shower for a host of gels and washes and loofahs. After a couple weeks, I was convinced all those nonsense girlie products were actually there for a reason.

Then I traveled with nary a loofah or scrub and have since gone back to my old ways. Though I fully recognize that seemingly superfluous shower products certain serve their purpose in the daily regimen, I have found that the real key is lotion. Without that, we are nothing. OK that might be overstating it, but regardless of how I clean my body, lotion has been the trusty standby to guarantee nice-feeling skin.

But the real focus this time is on shaving. I have always been a fan of the cheap yet trusty pink razors that come a dozen to a $5-pack, but on a whim I thought I’d try out a couple new brands. Really, I thought I would upgrade to Noxema brand razors, and since they had fat plastic handles, more blades than you can count, and came only three to a pack, I thought they would be quality. Plus, they weren’t as expensive as the $8 fancy-pants brands, so they seemed reasonable.

I was sadly mistaken. I gave them a try for a couple weeks and was disappointed each time. They plain didn’t work. Noxema should stick to making just face wash. So I decided to abandon the upgrade attempt and picked up a 99 cent two-razor pack of Schick from the travel size bin at CVS. As it turns out, these were better than anything I have used – which I suppose isn’t too surprising considering this is what Schick does, but these were no Quattro Xtreme Razor 2000 or anything.

Usually you get what you pay for, but not in this case. My guess is, I’ll eventually go back to the reliable Daisy razors (unless I decide to continue the tests and reach for the high-end ones or even men’s razors?)… I mean, if it ain’t broke….

As it turns out, all of the things we think will make us massively happy or pitifully sad or otherwise affect us profoundly are simply not a big deal.

See, upon recommendation from a friend, I recently read a story that ran in the NY Times magazine a few years ago called “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.” It’s about a few scientists who have been studying how we anticipate the affect a certain event will have on our happiness. They call it affect forecasting.

As the author explains it, we overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events. We think a certain event, buying a new house, for example, will make us much happier for much longer. Similarly, we expect other events, such as losing a job or even a death in the family, to make us deeply sad for a very long time. Well, according to these guys, we’re wrong.

I understand it has to do with adaptation. We tend to acclimate quickly to our situations so that the moments we thought would be much more intense soon become background noise.

This idea isn’t particularly new to me, considering the last couple of years have brought a slew of large changes in my life, all of which now seem like no big deal (or at least not the end of the world, as I would have led you to believe at the time). I figured my ease with dealing with certain events came from me being a generally positive person who enjoys being happy enough to seek out positive aspects of situations. But perhaps a larger part of that is adaptation.

The catch is we keep doing it. Even the scientists discussed how they knew they were overestimating the future reaction, but they continued to do it. We continue to overshoot our expectations, putting way too much weight on how we think a certain thing or event will affect us.

My point is that even though we know this – I know this and recognized it as I read about it and similarly recognized how in the end, the affect is much more muted than expected – we still get worked up.

I am still losing sleep over getting a job and moving to a different city. I want the perfect job and think I will just be crushed if I don’t get it. I will certainly be miserable if I don’t move to an awesome city. And while the truth is that it likely won’t be that big of a deal, I still sweat it.

How do we avoid that? Well, one of the researchers noted that he didn’t want to.

If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ”The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,” he says. ”When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn’t sweat as much because you’d say: ‘You know, I’ll be happy in both. I’ll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there’s no use in killing myself for the next week.’ But maybe our caricatures of the future — these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be — maybe it’s these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don’t want a society of people who shrug and say, ‘It won’t really make a difference.’